


Lilith Fair

by AviDragonLady



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Case Fic, Gen, No Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2018-05-29 10:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6370477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AviDragonLady/pseuds/AviDragonLady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not your typical family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Lilith sat across from her father in the kitchen. She was eating porridge, again. She hated porridge with a passion. She ate it for breakfast every day, had for as long as she could remember.  
   “Dad?” she ventured to ask.  
   She waited for his nose to lift from the paper before posing the question that Flora brought up that morning.  
   “Yes, sweetcakes?”  
   She fiddled with the spotless tablecloth. “Do… do you believe in ghosts?”  
   Her father slapped the paper to the tabletop, cleaned his glasses irritably. “Of course not! Why would you ask such a preposterous question?”  
   She twisted the tablecloth into little knots. “Well, Flora says they're real.”  
   His eyebrow twitched. “And just who is Flora?”  
   Lilith stared at her father, as if he'd quite lost his mind. “She's the maid, surely you know that!”  
   Her father struggled visibly to remain calm. “How long have you been seeing this maid of ours..?”  
   Sensing something was awry, Lilith waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, you know…” She finished faintly “As long as I can remember…”  
   Her father sprang away from the table, snatched her hand, and thrust her toward the stairs. “Go upstairs, pack a bag, _quickly!_ ”  
   “But… why..?”  
   He roared in her face, inches away, “Because _we have no maid!_ ”  
   Lilith blanched. Then she remembered that Flora was in her garden, but who knew how long she'd be there? She raced upstairs, threw her few possessions in an old, battered suitcase with a faded My Little Pony decal. It didn't take long.  
   She met her father in the hall, temporarily unaware that he did not have his own suitcase.  
   He took her hand with urgent, bone-crunching pressure, and they rushed for the door. He threw it open, but froze on the threshold.  
   “Come on, dad! We've got to go!”  
   He turned large, sad eyes on her. “I can't.”  
   “What do you mean, you can't?” she whispered frantically. “She'll be back soon, we've got to go now!”  
   In a distant, weary voice, he said “I forgot. Funny how you forget these things.”  
   Lilith glanced outside, then at her father. “What? What did you forget that's so important?”  
   “I can't leave this house.”  
   “Why?!” She struggled not to scream in frustration.  
   “Because I died here.”  
   Lilith staggered against the door frame. “What? No! That's silly, come on!” She tried to grab his arm, but her hand passed right through it.  
   “I'm sorry, but once I remember, it's hard to hold on to a solid form.” He seemed to come back to himself briefly. “Look, I can't leave, but you've got to! You have to be fast, because the ghost--the other ghost--isn't bound to the house like I am! That's how she got me. I assumed she was bound to the building itself. She's not. She has free reign of the whole property. Anything her family owned. Run, now. See if the old car still works.” He was speaking rapidly, before his mind wandered, as it had for over a decade.  
   “Does that mean I'm not a ghost, too?”  
   “No, sweetcakes. I think… I think I died trying to protect you.”  
   “From what?”  
   “From the ghost. Now go, run away, and live a good life, like I always wanted you to!”  
   Lilith got as far as the front yard before Flora found her. The “maid”, dressed in an antebellum gown of sober gray, saw the suitcase in her young charge’s hand, and… changed. Her face took on a hideous, sunken cast, darkened like the sky before a storm. Her hands became hooked, clawed things that grasped at her sleeve with viciously anxious tugs.  
   “Where do you think you're going, young miss? Away from Mama Flora, you ungrateful little wretch? Always leaving, children are!” Even her voice had changed. No longer the genteel, cultured voice of a lady, it was a harpy’s screech.  
   “N...no, Mama Flora. I wanted to go to school, that's all. Those truant officers and social workers haven't been around in a while, but I remember what they said about school. Opportunities, they said. Don't you want me to be successful, Mama Flora?”  
   For a moment, she thought it might work. The ghost thought for a few seconds, but when her face set in concave stone, she knew she was done for. She tried another tactic.  
   “Or things can just go back to the way they were. Please don't be angry, Mama Flora!”  
   The ghost wasn't fooled. “How do I know you won't try to run away again?”  
   Lilith thought desperately. “I can't leave Daddy! I didn't know he couldn't come with me.” She never referred to her father as Daddy, but the ghost smiled. It was a nauseating sight, but Lilith bravely gritted her teeth into a semblance of a smile and took a step toward the house.  
   “Yes, my child. You will stay with me forever, unlike those ungrateful wretches I spawned.”  
   A new, masculine voice said “‘Fraid not, sister.” Then Flora was gone, evaporated by a shotgun blast.  
   Lilith hit the ground, afraid for her life. The stranger immediately yanked her to her feet and thrust her toward a tall, long-haired man.  
   “Get her in the car, Sammy. Hey, mister, you know where she's buried?”  
   Her dad gestured to the back of the house. ”Unmarked grave out behind the garden.”  
   “Garden? Nobody mentioned a garden.” The shorter man shrugged, shouldered the shotgun, and struck out in that direction.  
   The taller, hotter man tugged her toward the driveway. It was overgrown, which is how she'd missed the sleek black car parked there.  
   “Get in!” the man, “Sammy”, ordered.  
   She ducked in, threw her suitcase in the back seat. Sammy had the car in motion almost before her door shut. They sped down the drive in reverse, gravel spraying in their wake.  
   Lilith screamed when Flora appeared in the backseat next to her My Little Pony suitcase.  
   The tall man swung a crowbar at her, and she vaporized, but not for long. She reappeared, clinging to the hood like a macabre ornament. She began climbing toward them, in slow motion. Lilith shrieked again.  
   Then, she just… disappeared.  
   “What happened?” she yelped.  
   “We must've reached the boundary line.” He exhaled with relief, then snatched up his phone.  
    **She's headed your way,** he texted.  
   Several minutes passed, with nothing but the rumble of an idling Chevy Impala to break the tense silence. When the phone buzzed in his hand, he scanned the text. He broke into a wide smile.  
   “He's okay.”  
   “Who, my dad?”  
   Sammy looked up. “Oh, uh, probably. I meant my brother, Dean. Should we go check on your dad?”  
   She thought for a while, finally nodded. “If he's a ghost, and you guys have a way to keep him from becoming like… that… then yes, let's check on him.”  
   “Your dad's a ghost?” He didn't sound as shocked as she thought he should.  
   “Yeah. Crazy day…”  
   The tall man looked thoughtful as he drove back the way they came, but he said nothing.  
   The other man, Sammy’s brother, was waiting at the front door with her dad. She wanted to run to him, hug him, but she wasn't sure he'd be solid enough to hug.  
   She hugged the rugged man at his side instead.  
   “Thank you for saving us.”  
   She turned to her father, one last time. “I'm safe now, Dad. You can go to Heaven.”  
   He smiled, a beatific, radiant thing. His body lit a warm gold, and he dissolved into a ray of molten sunshine.  
   Lilith wept, openly and without force.  
   In time, she turned to the brothers waiting respectfully by their car. “I'm ready.”

Epilogue:  
   Lilith rested in the back seat, apparently asleep.  
   “So the two ghosts raised her?”  
   “Yeah,” Dean said with a shake of his head. “The dad didn't remember being dead, or the ghost that offed him. He says he never saw this Flora gal, but the lore said she lost all her kids to the war.”  
   “Lore? Wait, so he was a Hunter too?”  
   Dean laughed once. “Yeah. So the ghost raises her for twelve years.”  
   “Wow!” Sam did some quick math. “So she was what, four when her dad got waxed?” A thought occurred to him. “So if they're both ghosts, and neither of 'em can leave the grounds, what did she eat?”  
   “Well, I found a garden out back, and some chickens.” He paused, turning slightly green. “There was also this… smokehouse.”  
   The boys looked at each other, both a faint shade of green.  
   “You don't think..?” Sam asked.  
   “They never did find the bodies of those missing people. Neither did I.”  
   Sam gulped down a wad of nausea.  
   “Long pig,” Dean said with a sickly smile.  
   After a long silence, Sam asked a question he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to. “Did, ah, did you find her dad's body?”  
   Without taking his eyes off the road, Dean said “No…” His hands flexed on the wheel.  
   Several miles later, Sam said with gallows humor “Good thing she isn't a rugaru, huh?”  
   Lilith sat up. “Rugaru? Why does that word sound familiar?”  
   The boys exchanged a look filled with shock and dread.  
   “Awesome…”


	2. Small Town Strangeness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something isn't quite right here...

The only sound besides the low growl of the Impala’s engine was the slow flap of pages. The boys were consumed by thoughts of what they might have to do, and paid it little heed. They drove in no particular direction, stopping for food as needed; postponing the inevitable as long as possible.  
   Finally, Sam had to break the silence. He asked Lilith what she was reading.  
   She didn't answer. He looked at Dean, who shrugged. “She must be a nerd. Like you.” He glanced at Sam and attempted a smirk. “You know how you get when you're reading. Damned near have to set off a nuke to get your attention.”  
   Sam didn't laugh, but Lilith did.  
   Sam looked in the backseat and froze. In her lap was not the frivolous paperback he'd expected.  
   It was a Hunter's journal.  
   In a voice carefully stripped of emotion, Sam asked where Lilith had gotten the book.  
   Distracted, she said “It was my dad's. He used to read it to me at bedtime.”  
   “I wouldn't think a Hunter's journal would make good bedtime reading,” Sam said dubiously.  
   Dean momentarily swerved into the oncoming lane, but remained outwardly calm. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles stood out in stark relief. Sam knew he was thinking about the journal they'd inherited from their own father.  
   “Ah, _here_ it is! I thought I remembered seeing rugaru in here somewhere! I could handle the demons, gods, and djinn. It's the things that used to be human that always creeped me out.”  
   The boys exchanged a Look, but neither corrected her assumption that demons were never human.  
   “So your dad was a Hunter?”  
   Sam punched Dean in the arm.  
   “What? It means she isn't a rugaru.” In all the fuss getting her out, they’d forgotten her father had gotten killed in the line of duty. “Now we have to figure out what to do with her. Jodie?”  
   Sam shook his head. “Somehow I don't think she'd like us dumping another teenager on her doorstep.”  
   “Yeah, you're right. She's got too many guns to go pissin’ her off.”  
   Lilith yawned. “Are we stopping anywhere for the night? I'm hungry, and I'd like to sleep in a bed.” She stretched as best she could. “Not that I'm not grateful for the rescue or anything, but this car isn't the most comfortable bed.”  
   The brothers had spent many a night in the Impala. They were used to her quirks and angles, but they knew that a teenage girl couldn't be expected to do the same.  
   “Sure, the next town that has a motel,” Dean promised.

   Sam checked them into the corner rooms nearest the Impala, which wasn't difficult. The motel was little more than a bed and breakfast. The rooms were decorated in faded floral patterns, with doilies everywhere.  
   Dean took one look at the decor and dry heaved. “It looks like a grandma's attic in here.” He sniffed experimentally. “Faugh! _Smells_ like a grandma! I might actually sleep in the car. At least Baby smells like man.”  
   Sam snorted. “If you mean it smells like cheap beer and leather, yeah.”  
   “ _She_ ,” Dean corrected, pointing a finger at Sam's nose. “And she smells just like I like.”  
   “Like you like?” Sam shook his head. “Sure, Dean, you do that. I'll sleep in an actual bed.”  
   Dean wrinkled his nose. “I just might.”  
   In the end, he did opt to sleep in the “floral nightmare”, as he called it. Before they went to bed, he made a supply run.  
   Something strange happened when he was leaving the convenience store. Some old biddy looked him over, in a manner he'd become accustomed to seeing in younger women.  
   “I bet you're a real heartbreaker, aren't you?”  
   Something in the way she said it didn't quite sound complimentary. All the same, he flashed his dimples at her and nodded smugly. “Yes, ma'am.”  
   Her face pinched up like she'd eaten a lemon, and she hustled away in a tizzy.  
   When he got back to the motel room, he told Sam what happened. “I wouldn’t have minded if she was hot, but she turned all cold when I agreed with what she _just_ said. Why’d this old broad hit on me, then act like I have the plague?”  
   He stopped, turned away, and checked his breath.  
   He grinned. “Nope! Minty fresh, as always.” His brow puckered in thought again, but he was already halfway to another thought when Sam interrupted the transition.  
   “It’s funny you should mention that. The same thing happened to us when we were getting Lilith clothes at the thrift store. There was this little girl nearby, and Lilith said she was going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up.” He blew out a puff of air and blinked, remembering how fast her mother whipped her out of the store. “She acted like she’d just cursed her kid or something.”  
   Dean sat up straighter, microwave burger forgotten. “She said those exact same words? ‘Heartbreaker’? That’s when the mom flipped?”  
   Sam nodded around a mouthful of equally horrible convenience store salad. When he swallowed, he asked if Dean thought there was a case here.  
   Unwilling to commit to anything with Lilith in the next room, Dean said “maybe…”


	3. To Hunt, or Not to Hunt?

In the morning, Dean snuck out of the motel room and went to check out the morgue. Sam let him think he was asleep, but when he was gone, he set his laptop on the little table to look through the local newspapers.  
   Except there was no website for the local paper.  
   It wasn’t a very large town, but his instincts still tingled. He went broader in his search, and found some articles online. They weren’t professionally written pieces, like you’d expect. It looked like some teenager had scanned in local paper articles and put them up on a free website generator.

**“Local teen goes missing after breakup”**   
**“Missing teen found in woods, suicide likely”**   
**“Husband of four goes missing”**   
**“Missing husband found in woods, victim of hunting accident”**   
**“Missing trucker found on highway outside small town, victim of robbery”**

   On and on they went, on the cobbled-together website. It looked like a digital version of one of their pattern boards. The only thing that all of the victims had in common was gunshot wounds to the head. Sometimes, they were self-inflicted, other times, they were head-on, like you’d find in a professional hit.  
    **What did you find at the morgue?** he texted Dean.  
  **-Shows what you know. Went to PD first. Not much here.**  
 **-You still there?**  
 **-Yeah, why?**  
   Sam sent him a link to the website.  
    **Shit, okay. You go check out the morgue. I’ll grill Barney some more,** Dean sent back.  
  **-What about Lilith?**  
 **-Who? Oh right. Show her how to use Netflix on your laptop. She’ll be so hyped she won’t notice we’re gone.**  
   Sam didn’t want her on his laptop. There were sensitive files on it, and it was encrypted all to hell. He thought for a bit, then sighed so loud it was a wonder Lilith didn’t knock to ask what was wrong.  
   He knocked on the door adjacent to theirs.  
   To her credit, she looked through the window before opening the door.  
   “Hey, you think you’ll be okay here for a while? I’ve gotta go out…”  
   Her face fell. She looked at the ground and nodded.  
   “You want anything special for dinner while I’m out? I don’t know what this town’s got for food, but I figure if you’re going to be alone all day, the least I can do is spring for something besides gas station grub, right?”  
   Her wide blue eyes met his. She was surprised, and trying to hide it.  
   “You okay?” he asked.  
   “Yeah, I just… It’s silly…”  
   He shifted his weight to his other leg, trying not to look impatient and succeeding pretty well. “What is it?”  
   She looked at the ground again. “I thought that was your way of getting rid of me,” she said, so quietly he almost didn’t hear.  
   He took a reflexive step forward. “What? No, we… Can I come in for just a sec, before I leave?” He looked around to see who was around. There was an old woman feeding birds across the street, but that was it.  
   “I guess so…” She stepped back.  
   When the door closed, he dropped into the chair by the window. Without preamble, he told her there might be a case in town.  
   “A case? You mean… like what my dad did?” Her eyes got even wider.  
    _She’s actually worried. Wow, it’s been a while since anyone was worried about Dean or me. Even Jody doesn’t fuss anymore,_ he thought.  
   “Hey, it’s fine. My brother and I do this all the time. We’ll be fine, I promise. Besides,” he said when she didn’t relax, “it might not be anything but coincidence.”  
   Her jaw jutted out. _Oh boy,_ he thought. _Here it comes._ He wasn’t wrong.  
   “If it’s nothing, then you can take me with you.”  
   Sam held up his hands. “Sorry, no can do. I’m going to the morgue.” He thought that would be enough to put her off, knowing how she’d been raised.  
   “So? You think dead people bother me? _I was raised by dead people!_ ” she all but shrieked at him.  
   He sighed for the third or fourth time that morning, and he hadn’t even had his coffee yet. “You understand how the gig works, right? I have to pose as a fed. Nobody is going to believe you’re a fed. Not even one in training,” he said, seeing her mouth open.  
   Her lower lip jutted out. “Isn’t there still a ‘take your daughter to work day’? My dad used that one.”  
   Sam choked and spluttered, insisting that he was nowhere _near_ old enough to be her father.  
   Then he did the math in his head, and realized that he was, in fact, old enough to have a sixteen year-old daughter.


	4. The Coroner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is he hiding something?

Neither of them were happy when they walked out of the motel later.  
  He’d gone to his room to change into his Fed suit, and she’d gone through the things they’d gotten at the thrift store to find something suitable. She tried not to think about where Flora had gotten her clothes throughout the years. She wore nothing that she’d brought with her. _I might even drop these right back where I got the rest. God knows I don’t want to be reminded of that place!  
_   The only thing she decided to keep was the charm bracelet her father had given her shortly before he… died. _I have to say it, or it’ll haunt me for years,_ she thought with, appropriately, gallows humor.  
  Sam debated how to get to the morgue. Normally, he’d hotwire a car, but he didn’t want to be a bad influence. _Shit, she’s got me_ thinking _like a dad now!_ he thought. He tried not to think about Chrissy, and how she’d turned out after _her_ dad died.  
  He laughed, once, when he realized that Lilith had done the same thing, except she’d hooked up with real hunters, fighting real monsters. That made him worry all over again, so he went back to the problem at hand. There wasn’t a bus through the small town, and he couldn’t find any taxi services. There was, however, one Lyft driver in town.  
  He sighed, knowing how much Dean would tease him for it later, and booked the ride. Luckily, the morgue was in the same building as the veterinarian, so there shouldn’t be any awkward questions from the driver. _Right, because that’s who I need to worry about right now,_ he thought.  
  They got into the Lyft, which was exactly what he’d expected: a teenager looking to make a buck. _Probably to pay for all the mods he’s got on his ride. I don’t even want to think about his insurance rates!  
_   When he realized where his mind headed, Sam gave himself a mental shake. Just being around Lilith was turning him into more and more of a dad. _Impressive, considering how her name makes me cringe…  
_   He tried not to think her name very often, because she sort of resembled Lilith. She had pale blonde hair that waved a bit more than the hair on the body Lilith--demon Lilith--had occupied, but there was an eerie similarity to their eyes--you know, when they weren’t completely white. The mouth was different, but it was set in a dainty, pointed chin that was altogether too familiar for his taste. She was too young to have a body like the demoness, but given her age, he didn’t think about her below the neck at all. She’d had to ask the sales lady for help picking out clothes.  
 _Great… More dad thoughts. We’ve gotta find somewhere for this kid, before I start wearing suspenders!  
_   It’s not that he never wanted children. He just didn’t want a teenager that looked like a demon and made him feel… soft. He began to understand why Hunters with families didn’t last long. That brought on thoughts of his own father, so he diverted his train of thought to the building they were approaching.  
 __Maybe I can get her to wait in the vet area while I check the body? Yeah, that’ll work. No sane father would take his daughter in to see a corpse. I’m sane, right?  
  The fact that he had to ask should have told Sam something.

  “You’re sure you wanna see this, missy? It’s not a pretty sight. Headshots never are.”  
  Lilith stuck her chin out and stayed put in front of the cold metal slab. The adults sent each other a Look over her head. Sam shrugged, as if to say “I tried to talk her out of it. You saw.”  
  The coroner/veterinarian shrugged one shoulder, conveying his thought that she’d bolt as soon as he lifted the cover.  
  “Trash can is over there if you’re gonna heave. I just washed the floors in here, understand?”  
  Lilith crossed her arms, jaw tense, said “Just get it over with.”  
  “Headshot wouldn’t have been my first cadaver, but if you insist, little lady.”  
  He turned down the plastic tarp slow enough for her to look away if she was going to. The worst of it was the crown, so he was thinking she’d see the blood and immediately hurl.  
  He was wrong.  
  She stayed for the whole thing. While Sam inspected the skull for additional damage besides the gunshot, and even when they removed what was left of the brain, she stood there and stared with those wide blue eyes. She never said a word, until he turned the brain bits over in his hand.  
  “Makes sense,” was all she said, but it was enough.  
  What made sense was the damage to the brain besides shrapnel. When he assembled the whole thing on a tray, there appeared to be less brain matter than there should be. That was because it had been sucked dry.  
  The vet couldn’t be expected to know that, of course. To anyone who didn’t know what to look for, particularly a small town vet, it would look like the gun shot had scattered and fried everything in the brain pan. To a Hunter, who’d caused any number of gunshots to the head, it was obvious what happened to the poor soul.  
  “Just as you said, Doc. Not much left of the brain. What can you tell me about the vic?”  
  “What makes you think I knew the guy?” the shorter man asked.  
  Sam noted his defensiveness, even as he reassured the other man. “It’s a small town. Isn’t that how it goes? Everyone knows everyone and their cousin?”  
  The vet was stuffing brain back in the skull as carefully as he could, trying not to meet his eyes. Sam tried to get him out of his shell and say what was bothering him, but he wouldn’t budge.  
  “You’re new to the job, aren’t you?” Lilith asked out of the blue.  
  Startled grey eyes met innocent blue. “You don’t live in town either, right? You just sit in your little corner of the world and hope nobody notices, don’t you?”  
  His shoulders slumped. He shrugged. “I deal with animals better than people. When they asked me to be coroner, I said sure. Dead people don’t talk back, so…”  
  Neither Sam nor Lilith were about to correct him, though they knew better.  
  He straightened up. “You wanna know who knew who, you go to the cafe. That’s why I avoid it like the plague. Gossip flows hotter’n the coffee over there.”  
  Sam thanked him, then didn’t quite know how to leave the poor man. “Listen, are you okay? Do you need… anything?”  
  The little man shook his head at the floor. Sam missed his blush, but Lilith didn’t.  
  When they got to the cafe (a short walk from the veterinary clinic), Lilith stopped him at the door. Sam looked down at her, a question in his eyes.  
  “You know that guy had a crush on you, right?”

**Author's Note:**

> [ Artist/author fan page ](https://www.facebook.com/groups/752900498252678/)


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